Recent Ink Drawings
John Walker: Recent Ink Drawings
John Walker
John Walker: Recent Ink Drawings
John Walker: Recent Ink Drawings
John Walker, Untitled, 2021, ink on paper, 29 3/4 x 22 inches
John Walker: Recent Ink Drawings
Featuring eighteen works, some of which were included in our spring 2023 exhibition “John Walker: New Work” at our Grand Street space.
Alexandre is pleased to present a viewing room featuring drawings executed in ink on rice paper, showcasing John Walker’s intuitive and expressive reflections and abstractions upon the natural cycles of coastal Maine, which has remained a primary muse for the past twenty years. Walker’s keen observation of this chosen landscape is revealed in shape motifs which denote the repetitive patterns of tides, weather, and the natural rhythms of life and death exposed by extended meditation upon the sea.
John Walker: New Work Exhibition Catalogue
Among these are the swooping forms which invoke fishing nets used to catch eels in the Pemaquid River, which runs nearby Walker’s studio, as well as the forms of a clock and shell borrowed from Cezanné’s The Black Marble Clock (1869-71). In the catalogue for the gallery’s recent show of Walker’s new work, John Yau described this motif as a “way to connect to another artist while scrutinizing one’s consciousness of solitude and mortality.”
The catalogue from the recent exhibition of John Walker’s new paintings and drawings is available from the gallery and can be mailed on request. Clink for a link to Walker’s spring show presented at the gallery’s 291 Grand Street location.
John Walker, Untitled, 2022, gouache and ink on paper, 29 1/2 x 22 inches
Walker’s spring show was just named a best of 2023 by Hyperallergic, which says, “He refuses to stay in any lane, and, in that regard, he is unruly. He invites the viewer into a world that is disconsolate, dissonant, elegiacal, haunted, inchoate, and primordial.”
Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906), The Black Marble Clock, 1869-70, oil on canvas, 21 1/4 x 28 3/4 inches. Private collection.
An emotional and vibrant love letter to the beauty of Coastal Maine, Walker sees water in graphic, almost abstract terms—streaming, curving, cresting.
—Lucy Horowitz
John Walker, Untitled, 2021, ink on paper, 29 1/2 x 22 inches
John Walker’s desire for artistic freedom has motivated him to pursue a singular trajectory for more than six decades. What distinguishes his trajectory from the ones taken by many of his contemporaries is his commitment to be open to, as well as address, what it means to be alive in time. For him, art is neither separate from life and nor does it offer you sanctuary from time. As a result, Walker has produced a diverse oeuvre inspired by many sources and nearly impossible to characterize. He is an abstract artist who paints plein air and a painter committed to drawing.
— John Yau
John Walker, Untitled, 2022, gouache and ink on paper, 29 1/2 x 22 inches
His quest for light brings him so often to a familiar place–a place that his imagination inhabits and in which he feels most at home. It is a place where other artists have dwelled, most of all Rembrandt, whom Max Beckmann always called “the Chief,” and after him Goya, particularly in his aquatints with their grainy intimation of mystery. Of course, light in those old masters was always invented, and so it is with the light that Walker creates.
— Dore Ashton
In these works, inspired by things seen and by Cézanne’s The Black Marble Clock (1869–71), the intersection of linear and cyclical time—dissipation and renewal—is very much on the artist’s mind. Meditating upon Cézanne’s somber, disquieting painting, Walker contemplates mortality and fleeting moments of joy.
— John Yau
I get very excited at times because most of the [ink] paintings are done with old brushes that have stiffened and have no other use anymore. But you know, you can get the edge of a brush that sticks out a little bit, and you can dip it in ink, and you can come up with this. You know, you’d think one would get a small brush for smaller marks. But no, you get a big brush that’s stiff as hell and is dead to the world and you pick it up and give it something you never expected to see from that old brush.
— John Walker
John Walker, Untitled, 2021, charcoal, gouache and ink on paper, 29 3/4 x 22 inches
Regardless of process, Walker’s practice explores the edgy relationship between representation and abstraction. He maintains a tight grasp on both strategies while emphasizing one or the other as he works his way through multiple motifs to seize and regenerate ideas and forms that reveal themselves, his curiosity in constant flux.
— Ruth Fine
Untitled, 2021, ink on paper, 29 3/4 x 22 inches
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Untitled, 2021, ink on paper, 29 3/4 x 22 inches
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Untitled, 2021, charcoal, gouache and ink on paper, 29 3/4 x 22 inches
Sold
Untitled, 2022, gouache and ink on paper, 29 1/2 x 22 inches
Sold
